​BOISE UKULELE GROUP (BUG)

Ukulele music for all occasions.Luaus - Banquets - Parties - Weddings etc.We play a wide variety of music.

Hawaiian - Standards - Golden Oldies - Country - Folk

Members are Charley Simmons, LouAnne Morresco,

Steve Lyles, Bill Laska, Jim Sturgill.All Members sing as well as play.

For bookings or information contact:.

Charley Simmons 377-0298 353-1622 csimmons667@gmail.com

---------------------------------------

Okay, so you know there are ukulele festivals all over the world, right? All you need to do is Google "ukulele festival" and links to lists as well as individual Uke festivals will pop up. Cool, huh!?! No way we can share them all with you. So we won't post them here. Where are you traveling in 2017 or 2018?​

BOOSTER UKE: FREE!Merry Christmas! For a limited time, you can enjoy James Hill's on-line BOOSTER UKE class for free including all tutorial videos, scores and recordings. And I really mean free: no sign-up or subscription required. Just click on the link below and experience the entire BOOSTER UKE series on the house!

www.theukuleleway.com/boosteruke

BOOSTER UKE is a magical learning method for beginners. It takes a unique approach that I think you'll really enjoy. I hope you'll test drive a few lessons and pass this invitation on to your friends. This offer is only good until the end of January so start your engines and enjoy the ride!

​See the Meetings page for details of a new absolute beginner jam session on Wednesday evenings.

This page provides information about upcoming ukulele events and general club news. Please see the "Meetings" page for information about our regularly scheduled BUG jams and Memory Care Center performances in Meridian.

NEWS & EVENTS

[NOTE: We received this notice a few weeks ago, but have not tried the software].

Here is a special perk you can share with members and fans of the Boise Ukulele Group — a 33% discount on eMedia Ukulele For Dummies interactive, multimedia learning software and any of the Ralph Shaw (“King of the Ukulele”) learning DVD videos that we distribute for both adults and kids. These lessons help folks to acquire or improve their playing skills and learn new songs. The eMedia software also features a software toolkit complete with soprano ukulele tuner and chord dictionary plus a metronome and recorder. www.emediamusic.com/UKEGP2017

​​This following item is from a newsletter sent out by Ralph Shaw, and is well worth the read. If you are interested in subscribing to his email newsletters there is a link here:​

UE #122 This Is How Long It Takes To Get Good

It's not unusual, especially here in North America, for a beginner player to be treated with spirited cheers, high-fives and "way to go's" simply for having made it from one end of a tune to the other. With all this praise from friends, family, teachers and peers it's easy for new players to believe that if their improvement continues at the current rate they will soon become a headline act. Well, let me put you right.

Where are we really at in our progress? New musicians should indeed be encouraged with positive feedback and not be constantly reminded that they are at the beginning of a very long road. It can be more than daunting to know the true distance to our destination: like the Himalayan Sherpa who never looks at the top of the mountain, we ultimately reach our goals by incremental steps. But we ought to have at least some idea of the extent of the task before us. In the back of his mind the Sherpa is fully aware that he is climbing a massive mountain. But are you?

The ukulele is touted as an easy instrument. And results seem to back this up. How many thousands, perhaps millions, of people have been thrilled to see how quickly they trained their fingers to change chords and strum out a song? With family and friends patting you on the back and telling you how great you're doing you may soon start to believe that you're disproportionately better than you actually are.This is a natural human trait called The Dunning Kruger Effect: named after two scientists who asked people to perform tasks of logic and joke-telling.

But the real experiment was that they got the participants to rate themselves on their own abilities.They consistently discovered that novices consistently rated themselves far better at the tasks than they actually were. This explains the mind-blowingly large number of people who film their awful performances and put them up for the world to see on YouTube. What were they thinking you wonder? Well, thanks to Dunning and Kruger we now know they actually believed they were pretty good. Joe Plink might seem a bit of a hotshot player to himself and others in his ukulele club but put him on a bigger stage, outside of his immediate and limited circle, and it turns out he is actually quite mediocre.Sometime or another we're all victims of the Dunning Kruger effect.

It's what gives us the confidence to keep going. Inadequacy and self doubt can be completely paralyzing and the false feeling of being more expert than we actually are pushes us through difficult situations. It has been likened to the opposite of depression. Interestingly, experts, better able to place themselves more accurately in a world context, tend to have a much truer picture of their own ability. The effect also explains why fourteen year olds know so much more about the world than their parents. Here's what happens: people assume that the time it took to get from novice to amateur is about how long it takes to get from amateur to expert. This is so not the case. Let me put it this way: on a scale of 1 to 10, if learning to play the basics on a ukulele is a 3 then learning to be a ukulele performer who can consistently wow audiences is somewhere around 587. That may not seem very encouraging but it's a far truer perspective of what it takes to get good. When I teach at ukulele clubs and festival workshops there is often someone at the end who shyly approaches me after everyone has gone away. In a quiet voice he or she admits that things started off quite well for them but now they can't seem to get anywhere and the gulf dividing them musically from where they are now to where they want to be seems so great. They ask, "What advice can you give me?"

They are so humble and it is very touching. In that moment I always feel I have so little of substance to offer. The gulf is indeed great, the mountain is high and the ocean is deep and there is so much further to go than you can possibly imagine. But don't think about that; just keep your mind on what you need to learn right now. And when you ask,"Are we nearly there yet Ralph?" I'll say, "Yes we are. Just a few more miles. Ooh! - look over there, isn't that a lovely cow. -- Ralph Shaw​--------------

2014 Movie: "Mighty Uke"

Did you know that there is a feature-length movie about the resurgence in popularity of the ukulele: "the amazing comeback of a musical underdog?" You can learn more about this movie, and watch the trailer and various other videos, at their website: Mighty Uke.